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Comment by trollied | Hacker News Reader

Wow, they burned billions.

Karl Guttag has blogged about them for years, debunking their technology. Hi blog is a good read for all things in the AR/VR space https://www.kguttag.com/

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Their tech is actually pretty decent. It's as good as anything else on the market. Their biggest mistake has been setting sky high expectations and just not coming close. If you got a cold demo of Magic Leap you'd probably be blown away. If you watch their simulated demo from however many years ago, then try on the headset you'll be sorely disappointed.

Obligatory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ7-F_vWUVE

> It's as good as anything else on the market.

I've owned and extensively tested nearly every AR device that's been on the market in the last 10 years. I can conclusively say: the Magic Leap is garbage for anything more than short-term entertainment. Between the extremely dim visuals, the horrible rainbow effects on every bit of text you display, and the awful resolution, it's not just bad for anything other than games; it's nigh unusable.

If I could go back and stop myself from spending the money on an ML1, I absolutely, without question would do so.

I've played with the ML and HoloLens and they are comparable. As someone who was raised on 8-bit games, it's mind-blowing. But really none of them are sharp enough to make you suspend disbelief that you're seeing something that isn't there. And I haven't seen any remotely compelling use case that would make them worth spending even $500 on. VR is much further ahead. Not quite mainstream, but it's got a real consumer niche and some really fun games and commercial uses.

I think the Oculus Quest is mainstream. It's relatively cheap. Easy to use. Completely standalone. And most importantly it has at least one game that it's actually worth buying it for (Beatsabre). Nothing on the Hololens made me think "yeah I want to do that again".

Oculus Quest sold something like 200k units... That's small potatoes and I wouldn't classify Quest or VR as 'mainstream'.

Quest has had serious supply chain problems since early November. They were unavailable for the entire month of December.

Demand is outstripping supply. You still can't buy one.

They’ve sold way more units than that. At least 400,000 units as of October 2019 according to this:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/gamedaily.biz/article/1337/repo...

Fair, but that is still niche. It's a big world out there and those numbers are small in that context.

Have any of them stood out to you? Is there anything you'd consider a reasonable consumer device right now?

Not GP, but the Oculus Quest is an excellent consumer device in my opinion. That is, if you can find it in stock.

The Hololens is still the best I've tested, but admittedly haven't tested the Hololens 2 yet. None are reasonable consumer devices, though; between the terrible FOV and the lack of useful software, none justify their price tags yet.

So question : if MLeap had delivered on the whole light field display concept close enough to the original prototype; but the hmd was a motorcycle helmet, then how would you feal about it?

I would have absolutely loved it! I'm not opposed to something that looks silly or cumbersome, as long as it delivers on the functionality and is comfortable to wear.

I'm having trouble thinking of times when I felt more demoralized as a developer than when the sales team has made promises that simply defied the laws of information theory, and then wondered why we couldn't just work harder to fix the problem.

I mean, technically, capital I Innovation often comes in finding a way to do something without violating the laws of physics, but that's how company origin stories are written. You don't schedule that on the project roadmap "And then a miracle occurs" style.

During a particularly memorable instance of this situation, I recall reading a story by someone suggesting that you can close this feedback loop with peer reviews across functional units. Marketing reviewed product management, product management reviewed development, development reviewed QA, and QA reviewed...

And this is the kicker: QA reviewed marketing. So if marketing sold something that was undefinable and thus untestable, they got an earful from QA. No bonus for you.

I fantasized about that over countless cups of coffee with coworkers for the next year or two.

> I'm having trouble thinking of times when I felt more demoralized as a developer than when the sales team has made promises that simply defied the laws of information theory, and then wondered why we couldn't just work harder to fix the problem.

Years ago, when "Web 2.0" was only just taking off as a buzz word ('07-'08?), Marketing came to my team to demand we make sure our shared web hosting platform be "Web 3.0", so that we were ahead of the curve. That was a super fun conversation, in a "hitting your head against a brick wall" way. You'd think that people in marketing would understand the concept of a buzz word.

I know that feeling, but at the same time, if Marketing makes the sales, and the customers are happy, the plan is working. And I have definitely seen cases where constraints bred creativity, and the ridiculous promises of marketing actually did force the devs to be more creative and sometimes spark some miracle, aka, some really creative and innovative approach to the problem. It also often falls flat, but that's the gamble I guess.

That is management's job, not Marketing. For one, there is no trust relationship that can support that sort of act, but what's the point of project management if the marketing people get to decide the roadmap not only by themselves but individually?

Sounds like Theranos of Tech.

Waiting for Star Citizen to use Coronavirus to finally admit they’ll never finish the game.

I caught up recently with the friends of mine who had spent the most money on that game (at least a couple hundred.) The system requirements have grown past what any of their hardware is capable of.

Theranos was already the Theranos of tech. Magic Leap is just an overhyped product that promised more than it could deliver, not an outright fraud that jeopardised the health of its users.

Or if by tech you mean "purely software (preferably Internet-based) company", Magic Leap does not fit into that category any more than Theranos does, both being primarily hardware companies.

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